Whatever happened to the future

Smithson, Alison Margaret Bird’s-eye Axonometric of the final scheme for House of the Future, Daily Mail Ideal Homes Exhibition.

London, England, between 1955 and March 6 1956.

DR1995:0037 © CCA Collection Centre Canadien d’Architecture Canadian Centre for Architecture Montréal

Whatever happened to the future?

The Ideal Home Exhibition was founded by Lord Northcliffe – the owner of the Daily Mail, the British conservative middle-market tabloid – in 1908 with the intention to encourage discussions on the living conditions. By the 1950s, the exhibition was basically a commercial show for companies to display their domestic products that otherwise would not have reached the general public – this was before advertisement in superstores and commercial television. Under one big barrel-roof at the London’s Olympia Exhibition Centre in West Kensington, one could get lost among replicas and fake models of not only kitchens and bathrooms but also entire houses and gardens.

In the 1956 exhibition one of the houses stood out from all the other rather conventional chalet-style fake houses. A white prismatic solid volume, with a stair leading to viewing platforms in an upper level, contained a shiny plastic amorphous interior space that contained in itself a quasi oval void, a patio or garden. It was a house for the future, imagined for 1981; an answer to a simple question: what will our houses be like in 25 years? The architects behind this intrepid suggestion were Alison and Peter Smithson, today well-known for being the famous members of the Independent Group, the Team X and exponents of the so-called New Brutalism. For some a black stain in the career of the post-war masters, for others an unclear yet exciting project, this house was a fundamental building in the future production of the Smithsons. Nevertheless, what was the House of the Future really about?

As Peter Smithson himself said in an interview (Colomina, 2000, p.24), “It wasn’t real. It was not a prototype. It was like the design for a masque, like theatre.” It was in fact a simulation. A full scale mock-up made out of plywood, painted to looked like plastic, and implied non-existent curved glass panels, inhabited by glamorous fashionably dressed performers. A fictional couple was living in the house like in an endless holiday, pure leisure time. They were not working, they were not eating or cooking; they were just having fun: all play and no (house)work. This house anticipated and influenced not only the Smithsons themselves but also a whole generation, from Cedric Price to Peter Cook and his Archigram fellows.

Certainly, this house was made to be consumed. It was transient. It was temporary.

However, it was not implying surrender to the consumer society, it was opening a space for architecture to think about ideas. The Smithsons knew that these kind of spaces could be unlocked and opened to experimentation in the specific context of temporary exhibitions. From Renaissance to Modern pavilions, provisional structures were built to celebrate, commemorate or envision exceptional times. As in the early 50’s with the exhibitions and pavilions for Parallel between Life and Art, Patio and Pavilion and This is Tomorrow, the Smithson would use these special moments to develop concepts, images and answers to their own architectural anxieties.

Exhibitions were also used to push themselves further. As architects, how far can we go? No matter how surreal it may sound, this was not science fiction. The pavilions were always meant to be built. It was not the model for the future, but it was an exploration into the future, a possibility that did not condemned future lives to a style but opened opportunities for imagining new ways of living.

The house included the latest technological and electronic devices and materials, nonetheless it was not about the technology and the material possibilities in itself. As developed later in the Appliance House, the problem of new technologies, appliances, furniture and new materials, was all incorporated into a single concept that would transform the whole idea of dwelling, its architecture and its urban condition. As an urban model, the house criticized the suburban sprawl by incorporating the typical suburban private garden into the house itself and suggesting that, when repeated like cells wall next to wall, these units could create urban clusters.

As an interior, almost a biological experience, the house was like a wrapping fabric: protecting our bodies and liberating our senses.

Within the work of the architects itself, the House of the Future talks to the earlier Patio and Pavilion. While the patio in the pavilion is extremely optimistic, consumption-driven and playful, the pavilion in the patio is apocalyptic, disastrous and dirty. Or maybe they are identical. Both are radical critiques of different presents and visualizations of possible futures. Both address basic human desires and the whole built environment at once.

Today, after 60 years of the exhibition, there is no future for architects, there is only present. Under the pressure of the endless now and the surrender to the client’s brief and budget, architects lost their power to operate as visionaries, to be genuinely free thinkers, to produce architecture in the broader sense without the need of a capitalist client. The future still goes on, but under the hands of corporations, start-up and global technology companies, Hollywood producers and online real estate portals.

These kind of documents remind us of the relevant role architects can play when involved in the political struggle that shaping our built environment represents. The House of the Future was referred by its authors as H.O.F. In German, Hof means court, a patio. But also, hoff means hope.

References Colomina, B. (2000) ‘Friends of the Future: A Conversation with Peter Smithson’. Interview for October. Vol. 94, The Independent Group, pp. 3-30. The MIT Press.

Van den Heuvel, D. and Risselada, M. (eds.) (2004) Alison and Peter Smithson – from the House of the Future to a house of today.

Rotterdam: 010 Publishers.

Victoria and Albert Museum: Archive of Art and Design. Daily Mail Ideal Home Exhibition: records, 1910-1990. Reference number: AAD/1990/9